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Mon 28 August 2017 (modified Mon 03 September 2018)
in life by
Matt Soucy
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Not enough people talk about mental illness, though many suffer from one. I need to get something off my chest.

As some of you may know, I suffer from depression, anxiety, and a pretty low sense of self esteem. Some of you know this far better than others, being the ones whom I turn to in my worse moods. Sometimes I'll be having a day where everything seems to be going well, but then a single, meaningless thing will go wrong and I'll descend into a funk that won't go away. Other times I'll have a low that lasts for a week, preventing me from doing even simple things. There are also good days, of course, but it's hard to remember how they feel sometimes.

Even medication isn't always successful. If I'm not taking the right dosage, I'll still have those pits, or I'll just feel numb. Any time my dosage changes, my sleep schedule gets completely destroyed and I lie awake until 3, only to wake up at 4. Of course this leads to me performing subpar at work, leading to confidence issues and a spiral of "fun" until my body gets used to the medicine.

When I'm in one of these low points, there's no motivation. It's tough to get out of bed - tougher, at least, because I do love sleeping in. I'll lose the urge to even play games or read. I've described the moods before as "I can't find the music". When you normally have a song stuck in your head, or at least a beat, the feeling of nothingness is terrifying.

What runs through my mind in these times? A lot of it gets at the heart of my issues, so are a bit too personal to share publicly. But normally it involves feeling inadequate, going back to the self esteem issues. A lot of people say that the first step to finding love is loving yourself, but it's not easy to do that when your mind keeps picking out faults both realistic and exaggerated.